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Members of British Columbia’s notorious Red Scorpions gang have been operating a drug-trafficking network in central and southern Alberta for two years after escaping violence and threats in their home province, police say. Cory James Lesperance, a 29-year-old B.C. man who police say is a Red Scorpion member, is alleged to be at the centre of this drug distribution ring in Calgary, Airdrie and Red Deer.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper could narrow the gulf of mistrust with aboriginal peoples by blocking major resource projects including two proposed pipeline megaprojects to the B.C. coast — unless First Nations consent to construction, the United Nations said Monday.

Educators need to address the rampant use of prescription stimulants among students cramming for exams and decide whether it’s cheating, says an expert in Vancouver for an international conference on child health. Nearly one in five elite college students misuse ADHD medication for academic reasons, and a third of those don’t consider that cheating, according to research presented Saturday by Dr. Andrew Adesman to the Pediatric Academic Societies and Asian Society for Pediatric Research joint meeting.

Tim Hortons has ended its relationship with a franchisee in Fernie and Blairmore, Alta. who was the target of an Employment Standards Branch investigation after a temporary foreign worker from the Philippines claimed he was denied overtime pay for years. In an emailed statement, Tim Horton’s spokeswoman Olga Petrycki said the company has “terminated our relationship with the Blairmore, Alberta/Fernie B.C. franchisee for failing to comply with Employment Standards requirements, a matter Tim Hortons takes very seriously.”

The crowded field of new pipelines proposed for British Columbia is about to get even more crowded. On Monday morning a new First Nations-backed pipeline in partnership with the Aquilini Group gathered steam with the decision by a Burns Lake band to withdraw support for the competing Enbridge Northern Gateway project.

OTTAWA — Backers of the $7.9-billion Northern Gateway pipeline, keen to improve aboriginal support, are dangling the possibility of a much bigger native ownership stake, according to a B.C. First Nations leader. The overture comes from former Conservative cabinet minister Jim Prentice, who last month accepted a lead role in trying to win over critics, said Art Sterritt, executive director of Coastal First Nations, a lobby group that represents several aboriginal groups on the north coast.

B.C.’s natural resources sector, including the budding liquefied natural gas industry, was declared to be in Canada’s strategic interests Monday as part of a non-binding federal-provincial deal that includes a commitment to encourage the active use of the Temporary Foreign Worker program. The accord was signed as Premier Christy Clark, bringing with her what she described as possibly the largest B.C. delegation to Ottawa in Canadian history, declared that the LNG sector could be a “nation-builder” at least as important as Alberta’s oil wealth.

OTTAWA — Kitimat Mayor Joanne Monaghan angrily rejected on Thursday an accusation that Enbridge Inc. is using a minuscule portion of its vast financial resources to unfairly tip the balance in its favour in a plebiscite next month on the controversial Northern Gateway pipeline. The two main opposing forces heading into the April 12 non-binding vote are Enbridge, with $446 million in profits last year on revenues of roughly $33 billion, and the Douglas Channel Watch, a kitchen-table volunteer organization which has recently increased its campaign budget 10-fold — from $200 to a little over $2,000.

CALGARY - David Krygier has been waiting for a 40-foot shipping container for nearly a month. The container, full of dried banana snacks processed in Vietnam for Calgary company Oh! Naturals Flavoured Snacks Inc., arrived at the docks at the Port of Metro Vancouver on February 22.

Can we all just agree that sugar, fat, wheat gluten, dairy, meat and salt are poisons that are killing us? If you read the newspapers, browse the Internet or watch television news, you could very well draw that conclusion. And there are large numbers of people who make the avoidance of one or more of those items a central element of their lives. We are becoming a nation of food tribalists, defined not by where we live or the language we speak, but by what we don’t eat.

Australian TV star and former model Charlotte Dawson has been found dead at age 47 of an apparent suicide. Famed for TV shows such as Australia’s Next Top Model, Dawson had also been an anti-bullying activist and was targeted by cyber-trolls for personal attacks online. In 2012, Dawson was admitted to a Sydney hospital after a suicide attempt following an ongoing tirade of abuse on Twitter.

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